The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventor, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
In order to facilitate the printing of images in a printing device, an image having continuous tones (also referred to herein as a “continuous tone image” or a “contone image”) is usually converted into an image having halftones. For example, a black & white picture is reproduced in a newspaper as a grid or array of black dots, with relatively lighter areas having smaller and/or less number of dots, and relatively darker areas having larger and/or more number of dots. For very dark areas of a halftone image, the larger spots run into one another so that the dark area looks like small white spots on a black field.
Commercial printing devices and typesetters are incapable of printing individual halftone dots in an infinite number of sizes. Instead, each dot of a picture usually comprises discrete smaller dots or pixels. A pixel is generally a smallest addressable portion of an image, and/or a smallest dot a printer or typesetter can make (although it may be possible to place a dot that occupies a portion of a pixel, and/or it may be possible to address a portion of a pixel), and, therefore, every dot may be collection of one or more pixels.